New Species of Carnivorous Mammal, the Olinguito, Identified

After clearing up a century-long case of misidentity, a new species of carnivorous mammal has been officially described and renamed by a team of researchers from the Smithsonian Institution, who published their work Thursday in the journal Zookeys.

The new species, the olinguito (Bassaricyon neblina), is the smallest member of the raccoon family; it somewhat resembles a cross between a house cat a teddy bear and lives in the cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador, where it is most active at night.

Despite having been seen in the wild and displayed in zoos and museums for decades, the olinguito has been misidentified as an olingo -- a close relative.

The discovery of new mammals is rare, and a carnivorous one even more so -- the last time a new carnivorous species of mammal was found in the Americas was three decades ago.

Discovery of this new species took more than a decade of research, which began at first in the National Museum's mammal archives, where more than 600,000 specimens are stored -- the largest collection in the world.

Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and leader of the team reporting the new discovery, pulled out of storage a brilliant red fur and was immediately stuck by it -- he had never seen anything like it before. The specimen was archived as an olingo - one of several species of tree-living carnivores in the genus Bassaricyon , but it did not appear to be like any olingo Helgen had ever seen. The specimen had smaller teeth and a smaller skull than other olingos.

The researchers contended it was indeed an other species, likely overlooked and mis-filed when it was placed in the museum's archives in the 20th century.

"The vast majority of the discoveries of new species are made in museum collections," Chris Norris, of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in Connecticut and president of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, told the BBC.

"Often people working 70 years ago or more had different ideas of what constituted a new species -- maybe they didn't recognize things that we would as being distinct, or they might not have had access to technologies, such as being able to extract and sequence DNA."

To confirm their suspicions, Helgen and his colleagues traveled to South America to look for the olinguito in the flesh.

"The data from the old specimens gave us an idea of where to look, but it still seemed like a shot in the dark," said Roland Kays, director of the Biodiversity and Earth Observation Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. "But these Andean forests are so amazing that even if we didn't find the animal we were looking for, I knew our team would discover something cool along the way."

The research team combed through the cloud forests of Ecuador and Colombia, finding olinguitos in a forest on the western slopes of the Andes. Helgen and others spent time documenting everything they could about the new species, learning that the olinguito is mostly active at night, it rarely descends from the trees, it mainly eats fruit and it has one baby at a time.

"This reminds us that the world is not yet explored and the age of discovery is far from over," said Helgen. "The olinguito makes us think -- what else is out there?"